Starting in 2014 in the US, this will be the law of the land--companies will have to insure anyone, regardless of existing conditions. It is also the law in MA right now.

For the Apple products I use I can't remember the last time I had to search the web to figure something out... two instances come to mind: command-tilde was a tip from Woz, and somebody on /. suggested turning on a system option that allows me to navigate GUI menus with the KB. But both of those are years ago. Other than that, I've figured out every gesture, hot key, navigation technique that I use on the OS X and iOS products.

Coming from that world, I don't really think to search the web when I have a problem like this, I just assume that the OS is broken.

I've found quite the opposite. The support is pretty good and I've never run into something where the instructions were too long to deal with. Contrast with Ubuntu where I had to spend hours and hours getting the most basic things to work and then a stable update would break something. Admittedly, this was on piece of shit eee pc hardware, probably would have been easier on the Apple hardware.

Removing Front Row seems more like reducing iOS-ification than increasing it.

A jail wouldn't have Premier in it. And no way will there be a MBP released without thunderbolt until they come up with the next connector.

OK, here goes:

1. Try to close MS lync. It even thumbs it's nose at you as you attempt to do so, "I'm not closing". Yes, it is possible, but the behavior of clicking on the close box is not consistent with other close box buttons--bas OS design.
2. In outlook, search for email. When you do so you get the box you were typing in with a button labeled, "X". click on the box and you are no longer searching on the terms in that box. You also get a few default fields to search in, "to", "from", etc.. there is also a button labeled, "X" next to those boxes. Click on those boxes and the field is forever removed from the search function. Well, that is until you click some other dialog that is completely mislabeled above.
3. Sometimes it is impossible to get an application to show its two windows, only one can be active at a time. I also have no idea how to cycle through the windows of an application.
4. The start menu recently stopped showing one of the applications that I use most often, both in the default start menu and under "all programs." I have to search for it to use it from start now.
5. Every time I take my computer home all the applications loose their connection to the server and get all concerned that they can't see those files anymore (they are deleted I'm told). If it waited for 30 seconds for the VPN to connect, the file would be there. Then, when it does connect it won't let me overwrite the file which shouldn't be locked anymore.

I could go on.

I like how he is concerned about, "iOS-ification" and then wants to use Windows which did what can only be described as a crappy version of iOS-ification in windows 8 while Apple has done little to OS X except cause ruffled feathers, mountains out of mole hills, noise at /.

uh, name one way.

There is about 20% more carbon (energy/emissions) in diesel than is gasoline. This means that you have to deflate diesel fuel economy by the same to get an even carbon comparison.

"Since humans haven't even figured out a method of detecting lies with a reasonable accuracy, how the heck can someone assume they can make a machine do it"

I can't write perfectly straight lines with pico-liter drops of ink, how could I expect my printer do do that?

You do realized that Obama asked the (Republican controlled) House to extend the 2% tax cut and they declined, right? That part of the tax increase was the Republican idea. The top earner (over $400,000/year) tax increase was Obama's idea.

No. It's a cut. Let's start with (1) there is this thing called inflation. Republicans like to bring it up when they are indexing taxes but not when they are comparing spending--interesting that.

Medicare, medicaid, and social security are going to grow because of the baby boom. This has been well known for a long time and is why they have a trust fund. Setting those programs aside, the cuts amount to about a 10% decrease in spending. There really isn't a lot of fat left in the budget that wasn't put their by congress specifically and even that is drying up.

The Laffer curve? You must be joking. When the top tax rate in the US was 92% and people paying that were asked if they would work more or less if it went up they said more. The one thing we are sure of is that the peak in the Laffer curve is further to the right than 92%.

There are several advantages to OS X, but all of the ones I can think of accrue to desktop users only. Examples include that spellcheck is so easy to include in every application that it is everywhere that it makes sense to have it. Versions is also really great for word processing in LaTeX where you could use a versioning system but why here it just works without any interaction by you except to his control-S. There is also the fact that I've never had a Linux box where going back to a sufficiently old OS version makes it essentially not work without lots of messing around with text files to get around the fact that the update software itself has an incompatibility or something is just broken at some point in the updating process.

But again, all that is for the desktop OS.

At that point, you are sunk anyways, right? The time is wasted. What are you going to do? If you can't catch it on the phone, you're already toast.